Unmasking Interfaces: Archeological Moments
of Knowledge

Does knowledge become simply information when cultural techniques turn
technological? Since medieval times, the face-to-face communication of
knowledge has successively been replaced by non-human, discrete media of data
storage and transfer. Still the term and the practice of interfacing sticks to the illusion of an anthropomorphic discourse.
A non-metaphorical use of „interface“ tries to liberate machines from rhetoric.

The prosopopoietics of inter“face“

Is
it „natural“ that human swant to anthropomorphize computers? When I switch on
my Macintosh PowerBook, the first symbol I get to see is a smiling face drawn
on the computer icon. Thus I feel betrayed from the first moment on. In order
to separate the rhetoric of interfacing (metaphorical) from its technical
functions, we have to separate anthropomophism from media and the ways they are
being personalized. „Masks“ is the
meaning of ancient Latin (in fact Etruscan) personae.
The death mask, taken from the face
of a dead person immediately after death (that is: before decay), derives its
authority from the direct contact of the image with the body it represents, as
a material trace like photography, thus being both index and icon (in semiotic
term). In which relation does the interface stand to the data it represents:
technically or metaphorically?

The bases for knowledge are symbolic data
(even if these writing systems masquerade in the guise of images). The theorem
of the theatricality of power in recently flourishing new historicsim, headed
by Stephen Greenblatt, was based on such a mask, the mythic vanishing point of
looking beyond the archive: "I began with the desire to speak with the
dead“ (Shakespearean Negotiations).
This desire has long been a driving energy in literary studies: „a motive
organized, professionalized, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic
decorum“, and Greenblatt confesses: „If I never believed that the dead could
hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nevertheless
certain that I could recreate a conversation with them." This I would call
an interfacial phantasm: treating a set of data anthropomorphically.

The German literary historian and specialist on memory culture Aleida
Assmann deciphered the emergence of the literary genre of „ghost talk“ in
European Humanisms and Renaissance (Macchiavelli, Petrarca) as a genuinely
mediatic function of writing systems; in a script-based society prevails a
trust into the possibility of storing intellectual energy in writing which can
be synchronically be re-activated across time by reading (as opposed to oral
cultures) <Assmann 1999: 124>.

Since the Renaissance juridical fiction of
„the King´s two bodies“, occidental political culture has been used to the idea
of a persona ficta, a mask, embodied
by physical man (see Kantorowicz); fictious, though, means technological as
well - techné in its most ancient
Greek meaning. Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan,
defined the nature of the sovereigne in this theatrical sense:

A person, is he whose words or actions are considered,
either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or
men, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by
Fiction. <...> The word Person is latine: Instead whereof the Greeks
have prósopon, which signifies the Face, as Persona in latine signifies the disguise,
or outward appearance of a man,
counterfeited on the Stage <...>: And from the Stage, hath been
translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as
Theaters

- and to computer interfaces, we might add
(with Brenda Laurel).

„Larvatus prodeo“ (I´ll publish under a
mask): With such words, which somewhat anticipate our conference title
„interfacing knowledge“, René Descartes in 1619 declared his anonymous
procedures, since at that time innovative research (under risk of religious or
royal inquisition) required simulation. Since Descartes was not the only one to
do so, the dschungle of anonymous writers in 1708 required a dictionary edited
by Vincentius Placcius: the Theatrum
anonymorum et pseudonymorum, unmasking anonymous autorship already on the
frontispiece. The learned editor here takes the masks from serveral authors´
faces and attaches them to a cord. Medium of this performance is the academic
library, and the technology allegorically alluded to by this cord of masks (or
rather cloth-line, with mask allegorizing text/ile/s) is very precisely the
contemporary book-like container providing metal frames to which single slips
of paper with textual quotations could be flexibly attached
<Zettelkasten>, facilitating hypertextual sorting, storing and re-sorting
of evidence. Referring to the metaphor of masked authorship, a transitory
machinic „interface“ here replaces the traditionally well-defined order of
rhetorical loci or topoi in printed books: a new cultural
technique of interfacing knowledge,
and the volume from which I take this information - a publication on The „Polyhistor“ of Danile Georg Morhof,
edited by Françoise Waquet (Wiesbaden 2000), is appropriately titled Mapping the World of Learning. An
inscription on the frontispiece says „suum cuique“, to be supplemented by the
term „persona“: Placcius reveals the authors´ true identity behind the masks by
identifying authorship and persona -
a practice which anticipates later criminalistic file cabinets of police. While
the criminal archive has long resided on photographic portraits of delinquents
or of collected fingerprints - subscribing to an iconic paradigm -, nowadays this
iconic interface is being replaced by dataveillance,
as became evident with the still of a video capturing the terrorist Atta´s
passage through the gates of Boston Airport on early September 11, 2001:

Monitoring on the
metaphorical interface level means displaying images or icons; in its hidden
sense, monitoring means data survey; the alphanumerical control space. Instead
of images, we are confronted with unspecific digital data sets; even if these
data sets are still being phenomenologically generated as „images“ on
interfaces (computer monitors), they can hardly be called „images“ any more. The identification of still some 2200 victims of the
WTC attack can only be performed by comparative DNA analysis, in order to be
able to literally sort (or assemble) 14.000 found fragments of corpses. When
the faces are destroyed, they are being replaced by the data „mask“ (the end of
the art of memory paradigm of ancient
and Renaissance location of victims, according to Simonides, from the prosition
of the found victims).

Deferred
interfacing of knowledge: letters

Instead of technical interfaces, in the case of the French
post-Revolutionary historian Jules Michelet it has been the Romantic discourse
of historical imagination which served as a drogue of hallucinating voices from
the archive: "Dans les galeries solitaires des Archives <...>, dans
ce profond silence, des murmures cependant venaient à mon oreille" <Histoire de France, preface 1869>.
This is a truly acoustiv interface (since faces mean eyes, ears and mouth).
This has been replaced in the meantime by the multi-media interface in
computing. Different from the early number-crunching times, the computer is no
longer silent and for your eyes only (that is: „earless faces“, according to
Anthony Moore); audio-visual perception supplements the traditional
"reading" of data - an "assimilation via the ear as well as the
eye. Such a multi-leveled `talking´ archive“ allows us to re-enter „a mind set
that was endemic to the early modern era, even though it has long been lost to
us in the era of silent libraries" <Marcus 2000>.

Interfaces
between man and machine render the illusion of a conversational dialogue between two individuals. But the
hallucination of dialogue turns from the ancient cultural technology of rhetoric
to media - from hermeneutics to information theory.

Telematic
communication gererates - technically formulated - depersonalized forms of
interfacing, since the partners of communication have become ciphers of
adresses. People thus become symbolic systems. In this sense Michel Foucault
was right when he imagined the human face vanishing in the sand - a sand which,
in other words, is silicon. In
letter-based communication, the partners have always been aware of the temporal
delay when taking a letter into their hands. This mediatic delay tends to be
effaced by tele-communication in realtime (starting with the telephone); in
fact we need an artificial buffer, the answering machine, for a re-entry of postal message transfer (see
Jonathan Goldberg, Voice-Terminal-Echo). In previous times, though, the letter was considered
as interface, literally:

By letter we may absence make

even presence selfe to be.

And talke with him, as face to face,

together we did see. (William Fullwood, The
Enemie of Idleness, 1582)

Gregory
of Tours, in his Historiarum libri decem, tells us
the anecdote of the Merovingian king Chilperich (561-584) who once sent to the
grave of Saint Martin a letter asking for reply on a tricky subject -
hallucinating a prosopopoietic voice from beyond the grave (memoria) later echoed by Chateaubriand´s
Mémoires d´outre-tombe. The messenger
transmitting this letter even placed a blank page at the grave; after three
days without reply, though, he returned to his master.This reminds of letters as a dynamic, inter-active,
time-based (delayed) interface.

In
antiquity, the philosopher Epiktet called the postal letter a silent messenger
and the living messenger a silent letter. A prosopopoietic interface indeed,
when taking correspondence as the point of an ideal encounter between two
persons. The internet does not really mean a return of medieveal
"communication face-to-face.
Electonic im-mediacy is rather a
prosopopoietic illusion like the empty gaze of the speaker of television news
who does not look at us, but into a mirror, the camera, or the tele-prompter.
There is no face, but a self-referential mask. Here, the screen itself is the
interface, not the face of the speaker behind.

Indeed
the face of the speaker in television is not - like in classical theatrical
culture - covered by a mask any more, but re-vealed by a transparent mask (in
Martin Heidegger´s sense). Masks disguise and masks reveal. Conceiling here is
the message, since behind the mask retreats what is being shown by the mask.

Loose and
tight interfacing

If
interface means each form of coupling,
loose coupling then would be „medium“, according to Fritz Heider, and tight
coupling would mean „form“; here the printing revolution created a complete
reconfiguration of interfacing knowledge. The term communication,
usually points to oral communication, which we automatically think of as a
two-person game. „This may extend to letter writing. For printed communication,
however, it is completely inadequate“ <Luhmann 1992>.

Once
writing is defined as a symbolic trace in a receptive material, signs are
perforce transmitted through a technological interface. The book is an
interface no less than a way tablet or a woodcut print. But from the woodcut to
the computer, we have come to require machinic arrangements of greater and
greater complexity to translate representations into visible and sonice
arrangement our bodies are capable of perceiving. <D. N. Rodowick, An
uncertain utopia - digital culture, in: Claus Pias (ed.), Medien. Dreizehn Vorträge
zur Medienkultur, 1999>

The acoustical medium provides for the tight coupling of noises. The
optical medium provides for the tight coupling of things <Luhmann 1992>.

What
about acoustic interfaces? At this
point, literally „Knowbotic Reseach“ replaces narrative transmission of
knowledge. Under the title Simulationspace
the media art group Knowbotic Research installed a Mosaic of mobile Datasounds, an interactive walk-in sound data
space, collected
through the Internet, installed
at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz (Austria) 1993, later at the Siggraph
´94 in L.A. Here, the
visitor navigating a "datascape" missed the usual feeling for
orientation; „the composition of the information in the darkness reveals new
clues of perception, new sense of space, the processing of information.

Medieval
heraldy and parchment as interface

We
know that the archaeology of the interface dates far back. Heraldy was a
technique of designing a screen: the art of dividing a shield into several
figurative, geometrical or coloured sections. Historical research on
information technologies and interfaces reminds us of the interface-as-weapon,
the medieval „coat of arms“ and the military shield with its heraldic figure
(Heiko Wandhoff).

Heraldy has been a
technique of producing in/dividuality, creating a second, symbolical, juridical
body next to the physical one <see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King´s Two Bodies.
A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton 1957>. Heraldy is a
knowledge or rather reconnaissance system, replacing faces by symbolic systems.
The coat of arms functions as a mediatic prosthesis of the physical
body, enabling the owner to be at a place even if he was not physically present
- analogous to symbols of power such like the imperial image on ancient or medieveal
coins as the mobile, current interface
(similar to seals attached to charts). Only with the Byzantine empire, though,
the coins show the portrait of the emperor no longer as a profile, but en face.

Medieval representation of power was
based on the body as interface. In his vernacular didactic poem Wälscher Gast (1215), Thomasin of
Zerclaere describes the exemplary, prototypical ruler, who is supposed to
reflect higher virtues for the subjects, thus becoming a screen for projection:
„You are the mirror, we <sc. the subjects> are the women.“ Comments the
medievalist Horst Wenzel: „The master becomes a public medium, a screen
accessible for all“ (Horst Wenzel). Nicolaus Cusanus as well described all beings metaphorically as
convexe mirrors, all reflecting God - like the konvex mirror as metaphor of
seeing in baroque curiosity cabinets which concentrated the world in one glance
as speculum mundi.

From screen to
skin: Interfaces, let us remember, are never immaterial - not even in David
Cronenberg´s notorious TV-reflection Videodrome,
where the screen itself becomes „the new flesh“. Indeed, the interface cannot
be reduced to the optic dimension, but comprises the acoustic or haptic
demension as well.

Medieval
perception was aware of the material support (in fact the very organicity) of
information transfer (the parchment, that is: skin), an awareness which has
been replaced by the „transparency“ of paper since 14th century. Information is
post-material.

The difference
between the parchment and the electronic screen-as-interface, though, is that
its inscribed data are less volatile compared with the electronic, light-based
screen: ad perpetuam rei memoriam,
the materiality of the parchment-as-interface itselfis metonymic of its inscription (Michael Lindner).

The medieval chart
is a „metaphorical machine“ (using Pierre Bourdieu´s term). At the same time
every screen is not transparent, but a shield, hiding its material, technical
or logical infrastructure - „Hiding by Showing“. With regard to the technical practice of interfacing,
how can one glimpse the „faces“ behind and within the interface? Thus any screen is allegorical of its own
dispositive. The medieval chart dissimulates the real power relations between
the imperial author and the recipient. The task of media archaeology thus is an
act of un-covering. Hypermedia dramaturgies, starting with TV and video and
resulting in the digital worlds, consist of surfaces everywhere (or should we say „interfaces“)). This phenomenology of
surfaces though cannot be opposed to a hidden interior, since no semantic depth
is intended. They are what they show. Do they render all data for (dis)play, i.
e. manipulation?

(Inter-)Face / visor

Let us move from
the court of arms to real arms. The visor in modern times
signifies a hinged front part of a helmet, made of transparent or tinted
plastic and designed to protect the face or eyes, especially on helmets worn by
motorcyclists or welders. For medieval times, it signifies the hinged metal
front part of a helmet in a suit of armor designed to protect the face and
having slits for the eyes to see through (Encarta Dictionary).Knowledge, here, is attached to reconnaissance. There is a
tight triadic relation between knowledge, interface and the visual regime.

The
increasing trend to completely close the helmet though did not only lead to the
exclusion of the voice-as-weapon and orientation, but to the invisibility of
the face as well. The perceivability of the person thus had to be symbolically
exteriorized. The armour could only serve as signifier by becoming an
interface, displaying a syntagmatic order of paradigmatic elements (Walter
Seitter).

From
French vis (see visage) visage
means somebody's face or facial expression (in a literary sense);
metaphorically it names the appearance or look of something (itself derived
from Latin visus, the perfect
participle of videre "to
see"). But what if this
interface looks back, like in the case of current iris-scans?

Iconic /
idiotic interfacing

Let us, for the sake of undertanding this look / this gaze of visual
interfaces, try a media-archaeological amnesia of icons not in the modern, but medieval sense:

In the year 1463, the former bishop Nicolaus Cusanus sent an image across
the Alps, addressed for his bretheren in Tegernsee. The icon (which has been
lost) was supplemented by a 80page brochure named De Visione Dei. What we know is that the image showed a figure
whose gaze seemed to pursue the beholder, „as if it was panoptical“. The visual
argument is evident: Most of the believers could not read; they were - in the
words of Nicolaus Cusanus - literally „idiots“ (laymen, in other words: the
meaning of latin-greek „Idiota“ or „idiótes“). But the battles of iconoclams in
the Byzantine empire were not forgotten; images proved to be an ambivalent
carrier of knowledge or belief. That is why Nicolaus Cusanus ordered the icon
to be fixed in a room in such a way that the figurative gaze could fill the
room. In front of the icon, the „idiot“ renounces all (script-based) knowledge.
„You, master, see all without delay; since your seeing is reading",
Cusanus comments. The media scholar Stefan Heidenreich adds that today, such icons have returned on the
computer screen. Umberto Eco, in his essay „MS-DOS is Calvinistic“, opposes the
(nowadays prehistoric) MS-DOS interface user to the Macintosh User, mirroring
the schism between catholicism and protestantism in Christian religion. The
Calvinist version is concentration of information on writing / the alphabet,
equalling programming, while the Catholic version is counter-reformation (image
policy, iconicity).

The Apple „apple“
biblically symbolizes sin. But icons are not just religious images, they are
also „pictures used by computer graphics designers to help improve the
man-machine interface“. The apparent naturalness of image-assisted
communication has motivated the development of the iconic interface“ (Kenneth
N. Lodding). This is, of course, an anthropological claim which might be
questioned. Even if iconic communication might historically be the most
natural, earliest form of symbolic communication, the archaeology of writing
indicates that complex cultures require symbolic interaction by more abstract
signs, such as numbers and the alphabet. Since Alberti and Dürer, images are a
function of mathematics (the linear perspective, as explained in Dürer´s Anweysung zur Meßkunst).

With clickable
icons, programming-as-writing and the simulacricity of interfaces may coincide,
when it comes to visual programming.
Iconic programming environments make diagrams (or pictograms, graphical
notations) transitive: all of the sudden, they do, what they metaphorically
indicate, thus being metaphorical no more in a rhetoric sense, but in a
technical meaning of data transfer. Programming is carried out simply by
arranging icons on the display. Here,

objects
which the system deals with such as data and program are represented in terms
of icons. Programming is carried out simply by arranging icons on the
two-dimensional display screen and specifying flow of data. <Tadao Ichikawa
/ Masahito Hirakawa, Visual Programming - Toward Realization User-Friendly
Programming Environments, in: Glinert (ed.) 1990>

Icons thus do not
just mean small images on a display to visually assist the communication
between user and machine, but rather „a concept including both an object
consisting of an icon image displayed on the screen and the functional
description associated with it such as a program code and a data value“
<ebd., 61>; the icon, in its semiotic sense, here bears resemblance with
the coding as a kind of visual short-cut of algorithmic lines.

By the human
brain, images are being processed in this way:

An image is
captured as a whole. It is processed in a parallel manner, and the semantics
are entered into long-term memory. <...> The speed of image processing
and the accuracy of image recognition are two factors onwhich an iconic-based
man-machine interface can capitalize. <Kenneth N. Lodding, Iconic
Interfacing [*IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 3., No. 2,
March/April 1983>.

- with the
restriction that icons may be much more culturally ambiguous than the
mathematical codes directly.

Is a virtual
machine like the BALSA (Brown Algorithm Simulator and Animator) a simulation or
a performance of such proceedings? Monitoring of programs in execution by such
visualizing tools can lead to immediate interaction with the program observed,
and thus advance from simple displaying / viewing algorithms in execution to
actually control it. The visual paradigm means monitoring the execution of an
algorithm in the cybernetic sense (communication = feedback + control),
comparable to the Williams tube in early computing (which did not only
visualize but actually physically perform storage / time-delay functions).

In a time which
has discovered speedy movement as the primoridial experience, we arrive at
temporally dynamic interfaces, interfacing (thus manipulating) temporal
knowledge: „BALSA provides facilities for displaying multiple views of data
structure, all of which are updated simultaneously during program execution to
give a motion picture of the program in action“ (Brown / Sedgewick 1984/1990).
Interfacing history:

(as indicated in
my introduction)

BALSA
could replay its saved history of interesting events and the view would update
itself incrementally as if the program were executing. This method has the
problem that one might not be interested in what happened in the algorithm over
history; rather the current state is of interest. <Brown / Sedgewick
1984/1990: 119>

Users of UNIX can,
by applying the order HISTORY, re-call a chronicle of terminal events - a
visual history, providing for temporal transparency. The RAND Corporation, in trying to automatize military simulation
games, called this synthetic history
(Claus Pias). Interfacing knowledge thus transforms from intransitive (i. e. without a direct object, from late Latin intransitivus , literally "not
passing over") to transitive communication („passing over“) -
communication with no interface any more, like the non-symbolical archiving f.
e. of biometrical data (fingerprint) on passports?

Visual knowledge?

Radar once
extended perception beyond the optical horizon of the visual, while at the same
time reducing perception on decisive data or identification and control. Still,
the optical metaphors stubbornly survive. Radar signals are being represented
by the cathode ray tube visually, thus establishing an interface between the
technique of radar and its human interpreter.

Complex data
cluster, when represented in abstract symbols and data strings, cannot be
comprehended by human reading any more which is too slow. For the sake of human
understanding, they are being abbridged by images. But thus it is not knowledge
any more, but visuality as media-cultural epistemé.
The future of knowledge will be image-based (actually reducing media to visual
data).

Since knowledge
and seeing konverge, both etymologically and in the act of reading. At this point,
I don´t want to become trivial but still I want to remind of the tautology of
the term „visaual knowledge“ in German: „visuelles Wissen“; indeed there is a
relationship between the old Germanic verb wissen
(wizzen) and other indo-european
languages in the root *veid-„ which
means „to perceive, to see“, but as well „wissen“ equalling knowing in the
sense of „having seen“; see as well the Greek idein „to see, to recognize“ in relation with eidénai equalling knowledge and, important for the visual arts, idéa as „phenomenon, prototype“, latin vidére „to see“ (compare „vision“). To the same etymological word
group belongs weise and verweisen which means „referring to,
pointing at“. Thus we arrive at digital pointers:
quantities of picture elements, pointing at other picture elements.

Unmasking inter“faces“: From visual interfacing to monitoring data

Civil
use of computing needed to create interfaces as user illusions. "At PARC
we coined the phrase 'user illusion', to describe what we were about when designing
user interface", Allan Kay confesses in his essay „User Interface: a
personal view“. Neither visual properties nor similarities can guarantee the
meaning of an icon, but their advantage is that they suggest to the user who
might me completely ignorant of machinic procedures the option of directing the
machine. Thus icons fulfil the traditional task of transfering coded
commandments to persons who don´t know this code. What is the alternative?
Transforming users into programmers? But icons themselves might become a form
of knowledge, as already practiced in scientific techniques of visualization.
To be more direct: The „black box“ of the computer, its hardware, might be
iconized down to its most minute register, in order to turn - analogous to
Cusanus´ notion of icon - the reading of the central processors into seeing,
that is: making them visible, transparent <Stefan Heidenreich, „Icons:
Bilder für User und Idioten“, in: Birgit Richard / Robert Klanten / S. H.,
eds., Icons - Localizer 1.3, Berlin 1998>.

How to images
display knowledge and what kind of knowledge do they reveal? The answer is
provided by an uncorruptible „philology of the eyes“ (Andreas Beyer). But
within electronic notation of knowledge, do images represent or store
knowledge, which can be processed and re-membered by corresponding computers
like within a psychic system remembering visual knowledge? The early design of
a visual interface called Dataland in
1973 resulted from the wish to create a multi-media data bank where information
could be spatially processed and retrieved - without using key words or logic
or relational criteria. On the computer screen there emerged a virtual surface
with visual symbols (icons) representing different forms of data quantities
(William Donelson).

Knowledge can be
visually navigated; thus visualisation and navigation
in dynamically generated information landscapes are central tasks for
multimedia designers. But do
interfaces necessarily require audio-visual orientation in the iconic sense, or
is a mathematical interface thinkable, as visioned by Leibniz - interfacing
knowledge in logical space? „Many scientists do visual simulation only to legitimize their
work to the politicians and secure funding for more projects, not because they
want to find something new with the visual simulation language“ (Paolo Atzori).

From
classical landscape painting to datascape navigation: Following the example of
the manneristic representations of 4 Continents as 'Kunst- und Wunderkammern'
by the Antwerp painter Jan van Kessel (1627-1679), the media artist group
Knowbotic Research (KR+cF) devised a knowledge space to represent what we
geographically call the Antarctis, a model of a Computer Aided Antarctica.

In his series of four paintings, Jan van Kessel portrayed cultural
knowledge representations of the four continents known in his day. KR+cF in its
DWKTS installation, limits the material to the available computer-processed
information on current antarctic research as it appears in public data
networks. The immaterial character of these virtual antarctic 'substance' can
only develop meaning and effectiveness (much as in the 17th century) if these
items are developed in independent constructs, which never the less remain in
distance but related to their antarctic reference subjects. As the given
empirical facts are both real and fictitious, the data space give rise to
phenomena which are difficult to conceptualize - a Computer Aided Reality.
<...> KR+cF designs knowbots, devices operating as spatially and
temporally dynamic interfaces for the observer's interactive navigation through
the information landscape. <in Blast: 1996 =
http://www.krcf.org/krcfhome/1dwtks1.htm>

Since
the Antarctis actually happens outside the Antarctis, as artificial nature in
data representations of measuring and sensoring instruments covering this area
and procuding, every second, a stream, a flood of data (like satellite vision).
These informations tend to become independent and can be grasped and
administrated only by articial intelligence agents (learning algorithms,
so-called knowbots) in computer networks. These agents, in the mentioned
installation, create out of the flood of information images from the south
pole. The data body of this Cyber-Antarktica is based on temperature data and
Ozone values - scientific material which has lost any deep sense or semantic
meaning <ibd.>, thus rather equalling the Shannon- than the cultural
studies-like notion of communication. Visual, interactive data clouds instead
of fixed interfaces, as explained by Christain Huebler in „Discovering
CyberAntarctic“:

<see
http://www.krcf.org/krcfhome/1dwtks.htm>

Our installation
"Dialogue with the Knowbotic South" <...> is based on knowbots,
which generate a vision in a data-network. They originate a hypothetical nature,
a Computer Aided Nature (CAN). <...> We have designed a visual form for
every knowbot's algorithm corresponding to the data sets. <...> We do not have an interface any more, a
mechanical interface, in the real world, we have interfaces in the network, the
dynamic network <my italics, W. E.>.

Finally, visual
interfaces become redundant in machine-to-machine-communication. The coupling of knowledge to visual interfaces
generates monitoring in all senses
(panoptical survey) - the option of tele-control, control in distance.But is there any
transparency beyond the monitor(ing)? Digital calculation beyond the individual
subject refers neither to the differential symbolic order represented on the
screen nor to a world outside this screen (physical reality behind the screen
is chips and current only); the digital machinery retreats into total
untransparency, invisibility (Slavoj Zizek).

Intermezzo

Let
me explain why I do not try to present a brief cultural history of interfaces
as points of communicative interaction, but rather touch some of the
media-archaeological repercussions risen by our conference subject. I will do
this in the sense of the original title of the conference: „Opening the
folder“. We are confronted with an archival rather than historical memory of
cultural technologies of interfacing. My avoidance of making use of historical discourse for connecting our
question with the past is allegorical, since narrative is the interfaces
coupling two different time systems, present and past, and turning archival
data into knowledge. Thus interfacing knowledge is both the subject and the
object of this essay: knowing interfaces.

Knowing = telling?

Either we know
something about a subject of knowledge, or we know where to find information
about it: infomapping <Bolz 2000:
131> - thus rather a mapping than a visualization of knowledge (diagram
rather than image). From storing data
to sorting data: the archive is the
interface to memory of the past. The notion of information already requires an
interface: Information, as defined by
Shannon and Weaver (1949) and grown up in the computer age, has come to mean
the combination of data into messages intellible to human beings; communication occurs only when the
meaning of a message is understood by the receiver. But this understanding does
no longer necessarily require a narrative shape. New media generate new, non-narrative interfaces of
knowledge.

Narrative has been
a culturally and historically specific form of ordering knowledge in (linear)
time. Carlo Ginzburg speculates that the prehistoric hunter could have been the
first to tell a story, since this form of communication permitted the leap from
apparently insignificant facts, which could be observed, to a complex reality.
Thereby facts could be ordered by the observer in such a way as to provide a
narrative sequence. At this point, there is a direct link between knowledge and
narrative as interface of communication. The engl. etymology of „to know“ reminds of ancient *gnarus (Latin
gnoscere, noscere).

To
know (according to the Encarta World English Dictionary) means in a rather
technical sense to hold and to connect information in the mind or committed to
memory (like list of names); both as atransitive and intransitive verb it
means be certain about something, to be or become aware of something, to
comprehend something: f. e. „to have a thorough understanding of something
through experience or study: know
computers“ (a kind of tautology), Furthermore, it means to identify
somebody or something by a characteristic, very transitively: to engage in sexual intercourse with somebody (archaic - the „missionary position“?),
and finally: to recognize differences, to be able to perceive the differences
or distinctions between things or people - „old
enough to know right from wrong“, or to know / to tell 0 froom 1,
digitally. The ultimate interface is the one between the physical and the
logical world, the anlogue-into-digital transformer.

This
links to narration: to narrate means to „tell the story of something, to give an account of
something in detail - from Latin, past participle stem of narrare , from gnarus
`knowing´". „To narrate“ thus, probably derives from
„knowing“ (cp. „ignore“). To narrate means to relate the particulars of; to go
through with in detail, to give an account of <Webster's Revised Unabridged
Dictionary, 1913>.

To
quote from the conference paper: The term „knowledge“ can be seen as indexing
both the diverse university discourses that produce knowledge, but also the
ways in which we store and structure knowledge, the artistic practices that
invent new forms for the human-computer interface; John von Neumann even wanted
to subsume the input- and output-elements of the computer under „storage
elements“.

Is
academic, intellectual, dialogic discourse based on the narrative transfer of
knowledge? The opposite is Leibniz´ dream to communicate by mathematical
formulas only.

Interfacing time-based knowledge

David Gelernter
proposes the data flow of lifestream
as a future alternative to the desktop-metaphor of present computer interfaces.

The dominant mode
of actual knowledge is the transitional, its transitory form which equals the
form of the electronic current itself. Accordingly, the user-orientation of
knowledge replaces the archival sublation of knowledge, putting emphasis from
archive- to process-oriented interfaces - a literal „liquidation“ of spatial
metaphors to temporal ones.

Instead of
emphasis on spatial memory (on hard disk) „the Lifestreams system treats your
own private computer as a mere temporary holding tank for data, not as a
permanent file cabinet“ < David Gelernter, Machine Beauty. Elegance and the
Heart of Technology, New York (Basic Books) 1997>. Future and past become
just segments, functions of a floating interface differentiating data flows:

The erasure of
intervals is the principle of making present. When we minimize the temporal
intervals of presence to the past and the future, presence itself becomes the
only stage of all times <Großklaus 1994: 44> - presence as interface of
past/future (the slash). What is presence, then? The present itself becomes the
„interface“ of all times <ibd., 53>. Electronic screens are time-windows
<55>. From interval to interface: the interface condenses time on the
visible surface of the screen which stages time as visually present. The
window-model has been historically successful since Alberti up to the landscape format of the present
terminal. Different from the cinema screen which still suggested a border
between inner and outer world, the electronic monitor suggest a window to the
world itself - like a flight simulator for aeroplanes.

But this has been
a monitor in space. The computer-screen, though, is a monitor in time, interfacing time. In accelerated tempo
images, symbols, data, points and pixels appear on the resence-time window of
the monitor - and can disappear as fast, to sink back to the memory, from where
they can be re-called every moment into a ever repeatable re-presentation.Once quantified, time is fragmented, becoming divisible
into smaller and smaller usable bits (Götz Großklaus) - questions of temporal
access.

Narrative time in
Bill Viola´s video installation Slowly
turning Narrative (1992) is being replaced by a technical close circuit between camera and
monitor, with deferred time. In Gary Hill´s video installation Inasmuch as it is Always Already Taking
Place (1990) video tapes whose time code (numbers) remains visible are
being rewound again and again. And in Bill Viola´s
video-installation Heaven and Earth
(1992) two monitors mirror each other in
time, one (with a baby´s face) mirroring the other (a old, dying woman´s
face) <Belting 1995: 97>.

We are leaving the
archival paradigm of interfacing knowledge as storage and retrieval, heading
towards a knowledge of interfacing time.

Against the invisible interface: aesthetics of enhancing the difference between man and
machine

The
invisible interface: Is the interface
a / the medium? Aristoteles
knows the term „medium“: to metaxu =
the „inbetween“. The medium is an in-between.

Knowing the
difference: Every reader of a medieval manuscript knows about the resistance
the materiality and palaeography of the objects poses to its decipherment.

Objects
and properties are not inherent in the world, but arise only in an event of breaking down in which they become present-at-hand.<...> A breakdown is not a negative situation to be avoided,
but a situation of non-obvisousness, in which the recognition that something is
missing leads to unconcealing <...> some aspects of the network tools
that we are engaged in using <...>. This creates a clear objective for
design - to anticipate the forms of breakdowns and provide a space of
possibilities for action when they accur <Winograd / Flores 1986: 36 u.
165>

To
quote from the conference program: „The interface, moreover, need not always be
benign, and instead can become a zone of difference and potential conflict.“
Only irritation reveals the medium.

Against the
oblivion of hardware by virtual / visual interfaces, the media-ideologically
critical project would be to remind the hardware-oblivion of software - a
forgetting formulated by David Gelernter as the ultimative goal of all
software:

to
break free of the computer, to break
free conceptually. <...>
Cyberspace is unlike any physical space. The gravity that holds the imagination
back as we cope with these strange new items is the computer itself, the
old-fashioned physical machine. <...> every key step in software history
has been a step away from the computer, toward forgetting about the machine and its physical structure and
limitations – forgetting that it can hold only so many bytes, that its memory
is made / of fixed-size cells, that you refer to each cell by a numerical
address. <David Gelernter, Machine Beauty, New York (BasicBooks) 1997>

Interfaces

The
term „interface“ suggest an inbetween between two communication partners. But
what if we read the interface not transitively, but intransitive? When the
computer screen does not simply translate information from computer hard- and
software to visibility, but is in itself the message?

The
inbetween is not a positive technical interface, but an invisible articulation,
a differentiating shifter, a relay which is at work exactly inbetween two
discrete states: zero and one, the principle of digital data processing, a kind
of pure cut, incision. In this sense all technical interfaces are metaphorical
(in the Greek sense of meta-pherein),
like the runner, the messenger of Marathon: the message will only be
transmitted when the messenger finally becomes invisible, retreats (or in this
case: dies) <ibid., 45>.

The television
screen is a test case for interface culture:

Everyone
should have as many controls as possible to permutate the size, shape, and
color of what they´re watching. Of course you can do this to a degreee with
normal controls, but generally they´re offered to "adjust" a picture
which is thought to be abnormal, rather than to create your own electronic
kaleidoscope. However, one thing you can do is draw a magnet across the face of
the picture tube. This messes with the magnet field on the picture tube and
distorts the image (without damaging the set) at your control. <Shamberg & Raindance Corporation, Guerilla
Television, 1971>

More
generally,

the idea of the „interface“ has come to define
machinic interconnectivity as a logic organizing both the virtual presence of
bodies in space and the flows of information between bodies and machines.
<...> All space becomes an abstract computational space. < D. N.
Rodowick>

Thus, the interface becomes a membrane / mem-brain.

Digital
interfacing is translation already, since the computer translates, by the
peripheral input-media (like the key-board), all analogue data already into
discrete symbols (alphabet, scanning of images). Coding requires die
transformation of reality into codable data (that is, whatever can be „read“ by
the computer). The world (events, properties) thereby have to be reduced to
numbers; whatever cannot be translated into numbers, literally does not count. So what are the forms and practices of „knowledge“
that we seek to interface?“

Interfacing as metaphor /
translation

What is the
difference between human / cultural and techical interfaces? The
human-computer-interface (HCI) is a metaphorical event in both technical
(transfer) and rhetorical sense (interface icons).

Still interface is a hermeneutically grown
concept that refuses to be exactly defined. In fact, the very word hermeneutics itself points to a divine
interface: the ancient half-god Hermes resp. Mercur, mediating between heaven
and earth, between gods and men. This job has been taken over later by the
interpreters of the Holy Bible, mediating between the medium (the Book / Bible)
and its readers. Today journalists to this job within an ever-growing
information world. Being subject to a speed of information transfer faster than
ever, the journalist though becomes a pure interface, with almost no time left
for reflexive interpretation unless in realtime
compared to the events.

The
keyboard or the monitor of a computer are interfaces which transform between
different states or representations. However, also parts of software can be
called interface. Consider an interface that allows for a communication between
two or more programs written in different languages. In contrast to the
hardware case, the latter interface cannot be localized anywhere. It rather is
the functionality behind it that allows to speak of an interface.

A computer monitor <...>is a cascade of interfaces that transforms internal electromagnetic
states via data buses, oscilloscope, fluorescent material etc., to
electro-magnetic states in the visual range of wavelengths. A purist may write
down a [partial] differential equation of the whole thing on a microscopic
level where the notion of an interface seems to become rather arbitrary. It
seems, that the intuitive notion of an interface is a relativistic concept.
<Hans
Diebner, Timothy Druckrey and Peter Weibel [ed.], Sciences of the Interface.
Proceedings of the International Symposium, preface>

„The
interface concerns what is in between: between inside and outside, between the
observers' world and the non-observable“ (Siegfried Zielinski / Nils Röller).
The Interface is (a kind ob double-bind) both a point of cutting and linking.

Otto
E. Rössler, University of Tübingen, Germany, on Relativity is Interface:

For example, the Now is pure interface. The world is pure
interface.

G. H. Mead discovered the relativity of being a person -

back
to the mask, again.

Interactive
interfaces

Peter
Weibel, director of the ZKM - Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, on The Art of Interface Technology:

Between cognition and vision, logic and picture, between reality
and representation new equations developed. Today scientific/methodic and
aesthetic techniques of representation based on computer aided simulations are
united in a new field beyond the science wars. So far the technology of the
image imitated the representation of reality and the natural perception by the
eye. Machines, instruments, dispositives were built to deceive the eye. The new
dispositives will deceive the brain. For that new interfaces have to be
developed, which impart/mediate not only between viewer/observer and picture,
but between pictures themselves. After the simulation of motion (motion
picture) followed the simulation of life, the viable picture. The virtual
storage enabled the variability of information and indicated a changeability of
picture content in real time. If it was possible to develop an interface
technology between the viewer and the technique of picture, the viewer's
behaviour was able to control/navigate the behaviour of the picture. The viability
of the behaviour of picture transforms the motion picture into an animated
picture. Where the paintbrush and the palette became keyboards and sensors
controlling the picture production and -reception, the access to picture was
coded by a technical interface. Ensuing the art practice moved to the research
in interface technology. The image technology was transformed to an interface
technology. Today interactivity and dislocation are the most important
innovations of the new image-techologies. The new interfaces will control the
information not only between different places, but between different picture
worlds at different places. Beyond it the interactivity will be also
reversible. Because of the interface effects of the viewer on the picture will
have also feedbacks. This results in a reduction of traditional ontological
hierarchy between the real event and the realm of signs. In the empire of the
interfaces reality becomes a privileged option between several parallel worlds.

In
military action as recently seen in the Gulf War, the Kosovo War and the
Afghanistan War, smart bombs that interactively check observations of the
terrain against a stored map of their routes are `smart´, i. e. they „know“ as
soon as they are able to enhance algorithms with interaction, while traditional
linear algorithms are metaphorically dumb and blind because they cannot adapt
interactively while they compute <Peter Wegner, Why interaction is more powerful than algorithms, in:
Communications of the ACM, vol. 40, no. 5, May 1997>.

Transitive
interfacing

From cybernetics
(Wiener) to interface / cyberspace: „A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system“ <William
Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984>.

This is the moment
to return to Alice in Wonderland:
Alice jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.

The ultimate
interface, then, would be the abondonment of interfaces, the immediate sending
of sensual data from computer to human senses / nerves, constructively: no
simulation any more, but cerebral stimulation.

As opposed to
traditional mimesis (mirroring
reality), the interface generates
(virtual) realities - from mirror to monitor. The notorious Turing test though
requires an interface between man and machine, a teletaper (as proposed by
Turing in „Computing Machinery and Intelligence“), since direct coupling
between man and machine is (still) not yet possible.

The
computer-human interface is not incidental to the accessing of information and
creation of knowledge, but a crucial epistemological element in knowledge
production. To put it more directly: The interface itself interrupts, is a
rupture, an epistemological break (see Canguilhem).

Interface
thus involves a cut, a rupture, always bridging a gap and thus, according to
rhetorical theory, being allegorical.

But
there is an expistemological rupture as well in the media-temporal sense: When
compared with most traditional physical interfaces, which remained relatively
stable over long periods of time (like the book/page), the digital (virtual)
interface is uniquely open to reconfiguration and radical redesign. While
current interface design still metaphorically (or iconically) mirrors the old
media (following McLuhan´s law), like the „folders“ in current windows still conservatorily
mirror the bureaucrativ, archival paradigm of administering knowledge, we might
now expect of computers and of our interfaces to them new forms which are
genuinely information-based. Utopian expectations computer-human interface
design in the last few decades takes place not in technology only, but as well
in fiction (which, in Greek techné or
mechané, has been the same term).
Obviously we expect the direct, transitive coupling of man to machine, the
analogue/digital (or qbit) hybrid.

Compare medical amputation and the
adjustment of a prosthesis: the background of Marshal McLuhan´s media theory of
„extensions of man“.

As
long as the key-board of computers is alphabet-based like a type-writer for
printing just letters, the paradigm of printing remains dominant; progressively
though the mouse-click
replaces the key-board for directing the monitor, and orientation shifts to
visually perceived information landscapes.

Just
like the media theoretician professor O´Blivion says in David Cronenberg´s movie
Videodrome: The electronic image from
the screen is mirrored by the retina of our eye (which can be transferred from
television and video to the computer screen).

Thus
the electronic data already invade our bodies by the very physical act of
perception. All of the sudden, the interface is within our body. The future
will be the transition from exterior to interior interfacing. The term
„immersion“ indicates the dissolution of the interface as such. The dialogical
model (and each interface is a model in the scientific, experimental sense) is
being replaces by the immediate (if this is not a metaphysical fiction).